Historically, for shipment of a plurality of funnel-neck portions for television picture tubes, each such portion has been enclosed in a carton in a funnel-down position and with the neck thereof extending out of the upper end of the carton, and then another similarly enclosed tube portion was placed over the first portion so that the neck of such first portion extends partly upwardly through the opening of and into the funnel of such other tube portion, there being holes in the bottom of said cartons for receipt therethrough of the necks of the tube portions. Such an arrangement vertically eliminated a substantial amount of empty space in shipping carriers such as trucks, trailers, etc. but there remained a substantial amount of empty shipping space horizontally between the necks of a plurality of stacks of such tube portions such as described above and arranged side by side in a carrier such as also mentioned above. Accordingly, a package assembly such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,910,411 was developed.
Although a package assembly such as disclosed in the above-mentioned patent can eliminate a substantial amount of empty shipping space, molded plastic separators such as shown in such patent are relatively expensive to manufacture and are, therefore, relatively high in cost as compared, for example, to a separator made of paperboard. Additionally, oftentimes the packer using a package assembly such as discussed above desires that said separators, due to said manufacturing costs thereof, be returned to him for reuse and, of course, a certain amount of return shipping expense for return of the separators must then be considered. Therefore, the package such as disclosed herein and using a low-cost and disposable paperboard separator and support assembly was developed.